Hua Guofeng

The most memorable event in the life of Mao Zedong's immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, who has died at the age of 87, was a conversation with the chairman which, in reality, may never have taken place. In April 1976, in the dying phase of the Cultural Revolution, Hua was summoned to meet Mao - who was himself terminally ill. Strangely, according to Hua's account, no one else was present. Barely able to speak, the chairman allegedly wrote down his instructions in a memorable six-character phrase: "With you in charge of business, I can relax" (ni ban shi, wo fang xin). Armed with an apparent mandate for supreme power, Hua was quickly accepted by the politburo as the first vice-chairman of the party and, after Mao's death five months later, as chairman to succeed him.

Millions of posters were printed and displayed around the country depicting the legendary meeting in Mao's study. A giant painting of the same event was hung over the escalator in the Beijing central railway station. Chairman Hua became, for a while, a name to be eulogised with almost as much fervour as had been Chairman Mao. Identically sized portraits of Mao and Hua were hung in every school classroom in China. And it was Hua who insisted on building a mausoleum for Mao in the middle of Tiananmen Square.

Though Hua's account of his mandate from Mao looked extremely shaky, there was logic behind his elevation. After several relatively quiet years, the political struggle between the ultra-left clique later known as the Gang of Four, led by Jiang Qing (Madame Mao), and the "moderates", now led by Deng Xiaoping, had burst forth again.

On April 5 1976, before the fateful meeting, an unprecedented mass demonstration in Tiananmen Square - scene of the much more serious protest that resulted in hundreds of deaths in 1989 - in memory of Deng's patron, the late premier Zhou Enlai, turned into a protest against the Gang. Jiang Qing out-manoeuvred Deng, blaming him for the event and forcing his withdrawal from politics. The armed forces leadership held the balance of power: unwilling to countenance an ultra-left takeover, they saw Hua as an acceptable compromise, representing a broad, mainstream Maoist constituency in the party. After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, Hua continued to provide a guarantee against a wider upheaval which might bring down too many who had been implicated in the Cultural Revolution.

Hua now proclaimed a grandiose plan for Four Modernisations (of agriculture, industry, science and technology and national defence) which would, he claimed, turn China into a "powerful socialist country by the year 2000". Yet Hua also proclaimed a policy of the Two Whatevers: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave."

This left Hua open to a shrewd political counterattack by Deng and his followers, who accused Hua of slavishly following the Maoist line. Questions were also asked about Hua's role as Minister of Public Security in condemning the April 1976 demonstration as "counter-revolutionary". When the Deng camp succeeded in reversing this verdict, taking advantage of the 1978-79 Democracy Wall movement which denounced the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Hua's political fate was sealed.

Having already lost the premiership in September 1980 to Zhao Ziyang, he was replaced in June 1981 as head of the party and the armed forces by Deng's protege Hu Yaobang, who said publicly that the Cultural Revolution had been a disaster. In a now less brutal political climate, Hua kept a face-saving position as party vice-chairman. But when this post was abolished a year later, he became just an ordinary member of the central committee.

Hua's career had been that of a solid communist cadre with his roots in the Chinese hinterland who had the good fortune to catch Mao's eye at the right moment. He was born in Shanxi province in the rural town of Jiaocheng: his father died when he was six and his family struggled with poverty: after attending a technical school, he joined the Communist party in 1938. Hua spent the next seven years of war on the ground in Jiaocheng county, a centre of guerrilla-based resistance to the invading Japanese army. He became chairman of the popular Anti-Japanese League and later took the top position of party secretary. Interviewed by the British writer Felix Greene in 1979, he would recall proudly that he was active in the struggle against Japan "both on the plains and in the mountains".

At the end of the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek that followed victory over Japan, Hua "went south" with forces of the communist army which occupied and "liberated" Hunan province in central China. He stayed in Hunan for more than two decades, becoming party secretary in Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao, and eventually secretary of the whole province. He clearly impressed Mao from an early stage: Greene was told that he had first met Mao in the early 1950s. On the eve of the Cultural Revolution, he organised a huge irrigation project in Shaoshan, mobilising 100,000 peasants to complete the work within ten months. Mao, who visited his home village at that time, would have been impressed by the effort.

Early in 1971, as some degree of stability was being restored in Beijing, Hua's name was personally "marked" by Mao (the term refers to the traditional method of marking with a circle of ink the names of those selected for promotion). He took charge of agricultural policy in Beijing and, in 1973, became a member of the politburo.

Immediately after Zhou Enlai's death in January 1976, Mao chose Hua to become acting premier. When he was further elevated to first party vice-chairman, second only to Mao, at the famous meeting in April, he would claim that he had sought to decline but that Mao had insisted. Less modestly, Hua was credited with leading the rescue effort after the Tangshan earthquake in July - though its success was questioned even at the time.

After being evicted from power by Deng Xiaoping, Hua continued to enjoy all the benefits due to a former leader, living quietly in Beijing. Deng spoke of him dismissively: Hua's time in office was "just a transition, not an epoch: his policies were a continuation of the late Mao, and there was nothing original about him".

At the 16th party congress in 2002, Hua, though listed as a delegate, did not appear, apparently because of illness. He reappeared in 2007 at the 17th congress, where the camera at one point caught him gently dozing.

Twice a year, said his friends, on the anniversaries of Mao's birthday and death, Hua made a pilgrimage to the mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Loyal to the end, he instructed his family members accompanying him to "bow three times to the great leader Chairman Mao."